https://www.theguardian.com/science...wed-techniques-send-innocent-people-to-prison
What makes me a little bit angry about this is the idea that "As forensic technology gets ever more sophisticated, experts are only just realising how difficult interpreting the evidence can be." Did they not consider that possibility before?
Like Michael Gove, I am not an expert in anything, but I would have thought that being asked to believe that people inadvertently leave traces of themselves wherever they go and whatever they do, yet at the same time to believe that the presence of DNA is strong evidence that they were at a particular crime scene at a particular time doesn't add up. If we are leaving DNA everywhere, then it could happen at any time, and could quite obviously be transferred from environment to another person and back into the environment multiple times. As the article says, DNA can even be transferred on coins.
And in the article it describes how DNA analysis is now in the hands of private companies who use 'proprietary' statistical techniques toestablish guess whether there is a match from incomplete, or mixed, fragments, but that their methods are a 'black box' - and anyway, even if people have access to the source code, no one knows whether the fundamental logic behind it is valid.
And this doesn't even address the issue of possible deliberate contamination of a crime scene with someone else's DNA.
Clearly DNA should not be regarded as the primary evidence in a case.
What makes me a little bit angry about this is the idea that "As forensic technology gets ever more sophisticated, experts are only just realising how difficult interpreting the evidence can be." Did they not consider that possibility before?
Like Michael Gove, I am not an expert in anything, but I would have thought that being asked to believe that people inadvertently leave traces of themselves wherever they go and whatever they do, yet at the same time to believe that the presence of DNA is strong evidence that they were at a particular crime scene at a particular time doesn't add up. If we are leaving DNA everywhere, then it could happen at any time, and could quite obviously be transferred from environment to another person and back into the environment multiple times. As the article says, DNA can even be transferred on coins.
And in the article it describes how DNA analysis is now in the hands of private companies who use 'proprietary' statistical techniques to
And this doesn't even address the issue of possible deliberate contamination of a crime scene with someone else's DNA.
Clearly DNA should not be regarded as the primary evidence in a case.